Saludos!

Greetings from La Republica Dominica. My first few days in the country have been awesome. I'm now living with my host family. Dona Ramona is the Grandma (my mother) and her daughter Wendy is is another volunteer's mother. There are always kids running in and out and they are a blast. I kind of feel like a kid again as I'm pretty much at the same level Spanish-wise as them, so it's a great learning opportunity. The house I'm living in is pretty sweet. The other volunteer I'm living with has Cable TV in her bedroom! There is always electricity too.

I'm living in the barrio (neighborhood) called Los Angeles. The only similarities between the one in California and the one here is the name. There are chickens and roosters running around in the street that like to wake people up around 5 am. I can see the sunrise out of my bedroom window. I took a few pictures so hopefully I will be able to post them soon. Also, there is always reggaeton, bachata or merengue music blasting. It's like a party all the time, without the drinking.

I know a little bit more about the work I will be doing, but not everythying yet. There are six of us in the water/sanitation program, and from what I've heard so far we will be in extremely rural communities. During out technical training, the first thing we have to do is learn how to construct a bed. Yes, I said "construct" a bed. What this entails I do not know yet, but I'll try to keep you updated. After that we learn how to build latrines and and construct pipelines to bring water to communities. Apparently wat/san volunteers have the most physically demanding work, and everyone know just how much I love manual labor, so that will be an adjustment, but I'm also happy about it as I will get exercise whether I like it or not. My roommate and I are going to start running in the mornings for exercise during training.

Starting October 4th I go to community based training, so I probably will not have access to email or cell phone or anything. I will be there for 5 weeks and then I will be back in Santo Domingo for 2 more weeks. After that I'm officially a volunteer and get to start workin on my own project.

To those of you at CBBEL, the Peace Corps told us that life will be like living in a fishbowl for the next two years. I thought you guys would get a kick out of that. I just got a little bit of a taste of the fishbowl too. A little girl came in here to make copies and while she was waiting, all she did was stare at me. I tried to talk to her in Spanish, but all she did was stare. Interesting.

Tomorrow afternoon we learn how to use the local public transportation systems. I already took it once with a member of the host family and it was quite an interesting experience. Four of us packed into the back seat of a late 80's, early 90's small Nissan car. This is the type of transportation I will be taking to the training center for the next 3 weeks.

The food here has been excellent thus far. My first truly Dominican meal from my host family was a heaping pile of mashed potatoes with onions and two large chunks of cheese on the top. Then for breakfast the next day we had one hard-boiled egg and some bread. For dinner another day we had rice with lentils and some spaghetti with chicken. Today breakfast has been the best so far. We had fried plantains...these are seriously the best things ever. I could definitely live off these. Also there was some fried salami and bread. We had the best juice ever too. I don't know exactly what type of fruit it was, but it tasted like either passionfruit or guava. Or some combination of the two.

If anyone has any specific questions or anything, let me know and I'll post it on here.

It's amazing how cheap the internet is here...I've been on it for about 45 minutes so far and it's only like 20 pesos. That's less than a dollar in the US. And it's pretty fast too.

Until Next time....Peace